Causation In-Class Activity PS 312

Construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG) representing your ideas about the causal factors involved in your team’s research question. These are diagrams that quantitative scholars use all the time to represent causal ideas. Here is an example of how to make them:

library(tidyverse)

## ── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
## ✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.6
## ✔ forcats   1.0.1     ✔ stringr   1.6.0
## ✔ ggplot2   4.0.1     ✔ tibble    3.3.0
## ✔ lubridate 1.9.4     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
## ✔ purrr     1.2.0     
## ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
## ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## ✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
## ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

library(dagitty)

g1 <- dagitty( "dag {
    Age -> Subculture -> BeingAwesome -> EnrollIn312
    Subculture <- RegionOfBirth -> TechSkills
    FearOfComputers -> TechSkills -> EnrollIn312
    BeingAwesome <- Age -> FearOfComputers <-> EnrollIn312
}")
plot(graphLayout(g1))

Each group member should send the DAG to their TA together with a paragraph or two explaining what each element of the image means.